Black Bean Burgers.

Another attempt at veggie burgers based on the now-disappeared veggie engine. Obviously, I still have it amongst my personal documents. This time, I went New World:



Black beans, an uncertain amount, but it looks like it was at least 3-4 cups once they were cooked up.
2-2.5 cups cooked brown rice
1 11 oz can of "Mexican corn," drained.
2 small onions
4-5 large cloves of garlic
1 package of taco seasoning
Teaspoon-ish of salt
2-ish teaspoons of freshly ground pepper
1/3 cup olive oil + oil for cooking
1-ish cup of vital wheat gluten

Sautee onions and garlic in oil, and mix up with previously cooked and cooled black beans, corn, rice, taco seasoning, salt, pepper, olive oil, VWG. Form into patties, place into oiled pans, and bake to your favorite stage of done. We like them crispy, so they get cooked at 400F for 45-90 minutes, depending on how much liquid is in each patty.

I did not add any liquid seasoning to this, and left the additional liquid requirement (beyond the oil) off this time because I had cooked the black beans from dried a couple of days ago. There was plenty of bean gravy attached to the beans, so no need to add more liquid. The beans were cooked with 2 sliced carrots, chopped onions, a clove of garlic, salt, and a splash of oil.

Michael felt like this was the best batch I'd made yet, and they were quite nice even straight from the oven; the VWG flavor I usually get while these things are still hot wasn't present.

Again, the only thing I really don't like about the process is the amount of time that it takes to make them and bake them. The mixing is pretty fast, so if I was using canned beans it would go faster, but I still need to precook the rice, and it takes a significant amount of time to cook them to the stage of done we like. Whatever savings one might be getting in terms of food cost is more than offset by the fuel cost and time cost. I'll keep making them, though, because I like controlling the ingredients and having more variety than the few commercial brands available that are soy and egg free.

ETA, 2 Nov 10, 12:40 AM: The veggie burger engine has reappeared.

Curried Beans instead of another Hoppin' John!

Now, I have a ton of cook books. Once upon a time, I looked at all the books of Medieval cookery I have and decided that I needed to try a recipe from each book I owned. I managed, and then I found that online sources tend to be more useful because I can look up a whole bunch of variations of recipes across time and space, and come up with something that represents my tastes and time interests--something I really love doing--rather than following something redacted by one cook and wondering if that dish, delicious though it might be, really represents the flavors and techniques used.

Now, I love beans. And I love rice. And I love greens. So, as I have fallen in love with Joanna Vaught's Veggie Burger Engine (which is still in my recipe books despite the sad loss of it on the internetz), and realized that I have my own Veggie Pie Engine, I'm also aware that I have my own Vegan Hoppin' John engine. Now, a hoppin' john engine is not as fabulous as a veggie burger engine, but it does indicate a cooking habit that suggests that I love, love, love dishes that are greens, rice, and beans cooked with oils and spiced to please my palate and complement the primary components in the hoppin' john*. Of course, it's meatless for me, but I'm not trying to feed it to a soul food aficionado, I'm cooking it for myself.

However, although I could eat Hoppin John and all the various versions of it from all the cultures that have taken to beans and rice as a dish with a silly regularity, I don't want it all the time. It occurred to me that it was time to try some of the recipes in my vast (or, at least, larger than most folk's) library of cook books. The first to catch my eye? "Black-Eyed Pea Curry" in a book called Hot and Spicy Cooking



I liked the dish a lot. I did serve it over brown rice, because, hey, that's how I like it. Beans and rice. It would do fine over any grain, however. I did think about serving it with corn tortillas instead, but that's for next time. The celery was very nice addition.

On the whole, though, I was waiting for the hot, and it never arrived. This is supposed to be spicy? I recollect thinking. So I spiced it up, and it was better. The primary point here, of course, is that it isn't as spicy as I thought it would be, but then, I think Tabasco sauce is a needed ingredient in most dishes. Anything you make is improved by lots of hot peppers, in proportion to their Scoville rating, so you are talking about an overall heat of 10,000 to 150,000 SU in the dish. Anything less will get Tabasco sauced. This got sauced, suggesting that I didn't find it to get to 10000 SU, despite the use of chillies.

I did not copy out the recipe. Instead, I took a picture. The original recipe is here. I did make some substitutions:

Ghee => Olive oil
4 Chopped Tomatoes => Tomato sauce. Non-awful fresh tomatoes can not be obtained this time of year.

And that would be about it for the subs. It worked out well and I'll likely make it again, next time treating it as a taco filling or some such and adjusting the SU as I may. :-)

Vegan Leek and Potatoe pie, and what appears to be the birth of the Veggie Pie Engine.

Some while ago, I made a parsnip pie in a reproduction 16th c. frying pan, which I really enjoyed.

This time, I tried a potato & leek pie in a geeze gravy and a "fake stone" 10 inch pie plate. I wish I could remember the brand name of the pie plate, but I took the label off and have not seen such a thing since. The only thing I can say about it is that I think it's some kind of cast ceramic, maybe cordierite. The point, of course, is that it's a cast stone material that is supposed to make crusts extra special crispy. I've had it for a while, and it was time to put it to use.


Leesie's Leek and Tatie Pie.


It worked nicely as a savory dinner pie, and with a salad & a glass of Shiraz, it was an easy meal. It also demonstrates the value of having a few simple recipes under your belt, because if you know how to make a basic white sauce, a basic oil-based pie crust, and perform a few simple things like prep and saute vegetables, you can easily assemble any variation on a savory vegetable pie you want to assemble.

Generative cooking, if you will, based on the concepts of the generative learning model.

This used:

• 1 recipe of basic oil pie crust: use your favorite to make a double crust pie for a plate as described below.
  
• 1 recipe of geeze gravy: use your favorite fake cheeze sauce to produce about 2-3 cups of sauce.
  
• A mess of potatoes
  
• 2-3 bunches of leeks
  
  • in short, all the leeks I had in the house plus enough potatoes to slightly overfill a 10.25 inch diameter, 1.75 inch deep pie plate
  
  
• garlic to taste--cloves if possible.
  
• salt, pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350F, or adjust according to your oven's personal foibles. The point is to have it at a temperature to bake the pie upon assembly.

Wash, clean, and slice the leeks. Set sliced leeks aside to soak in water for 30 minutes or so, to allow whatever grit may still be in them to settle out. Prepare your pie crust. Roll it out and set into a cool place to keep chilled while you are preparing the rest of the dish. Wash the potatoes, peel if desired, slice, and parboil in slightly salted water; check as needed and drain when finished. If you believe your leeks have soaked enough, saute them in some olive oil with a few cloves of garlic. Prepare your geeze gravy.

Now you are ready to assemble.

Prepare your pie pan as needed to release the pie upon completion.

Mix the sauteed leeks, the parboiled potatoes, and the geeze gravy in a large bowl. Taste for spice adjustments, adding pepper, salt, and perhaps garlic and other favorite spices and herbs, as needed. Set aside.

Place the bottom crust into the pie plate( blind bake if desired, I did not), then fill with the leek/potato/gravy mix. Cover with top crust, seal the edges, and pop into oven until done.

Serve and enjoy. This basic pie was very good with cayenne pepper sauce on it, it was good cold without additional condiments, and it was good with a pepper-heavy powder forte.

Comments on what I learned:

1. Typing it out as if it was really a recipe reinforces just how much work actually went into the dish. It's not a wonder that cooking from scratch has decreased so mightily in this day and age. They may be simple processes, but it's not really simple. It's largely why I have gotten into the habit of cooking large portions of things--that way, I have 3-5 meals for all the effort.


2. My oil crust recipe is very simple--flour, oil, liquid (usually water). I almost always use a mix of white and whole wheat flour. This time, I used straight up white flour. Ah, yeah, if it is at all possible, I will never do that again. I really like it better when it is mixed grains.


3. I really like this pie plate. The crust might have been better if the bottom crust had been blind baked slightly to decrease the inner side's moisture, but the outside of the crust was everything I expected a crispy nice crust to be, and, of course, the top crust was fine. Anyway, This is an Excellent Tool. I found it at Ace Hardware, of all places, on the clearance rack. The Ace Hardware site does not list any bakeware like it, though, so I am wondering if it is out of business. Sad.


4. It is a mild savory pie. I will be very comfortable trying a lot of spices in the sauce, to see what works, what doesn't.


5. When I made the pie, I assembled it in layers: potatoes, leeks, geeze gravy. It was good that way, or I wouldn't be recording this for my future reference. However, I would have preferred the sauce to go all through; this is the way I usually prepare savory pies. In future, mix it all up first and then place into crust.

Just as an aside, I'd like to try this with a little bit of liquid smoke--I think that it might make a nice touch. Just a very little, though.

Food for Michael. And me.

First;

Michael loves moussaka. I had eggplant and was thinking of making a sort of veganized version of an eggplant lasagna I had seen at this little cooking site: Feed Me Bubbe. I'd peeled 'er up and salted 'er for that de-bittering step Bubbe recommends... and Michael saw the eggplant and turned to me with these frakking eyes so huge and weepy and hopeful that they'd make Margaret Keane cry and said, "Are you making mousakka?"

Sigh. Yes. Let me look for a recipe.

I found this one: Classic Greek Moussaka with Eggplant.

It worked out okay! It'll be easy to mod for a version I can eat, I think. I didn't have tomatoes, so I subbed 12 oz of tomato paste and 36 oz of water, and ground beef for lamb. Since I was making this for Michael, I made the basic bechamel with whole eggs rather than egg yolks, and there was no real Greek cheese to be found, so we used a mix of Americanized feta and mozzarella. Next time, not so much water with the tomato paste. Michael enjoyed it tremendously and decided that I am the Bestest. Girl. Evah. He also asked for more eggplant in it next time, and lamb rather than ground beef. And then he ate every bit of it. It was *a lot,* probably 12-15 servings worth.

I was going to make a version of it myself, with a bechamel based on nut milks and possibly nut yeast and herbs in place of cheese, no eggs, and whatever fake meat crumbles were in the fridge, but there wasn't enough eggplant.

Next time, eh? And that is why this is here. This is the base that I'll build my own version upon. :-) And I made Michael happy, so it's an all around win.

Cooking with ghosts.

Late October and early November tends to be the time when the religions typically practiced in North America tend to remember the dead. This is my mother, more than 10 years gone now, the auburn haired girl that stands beside her own mother, who is holding my aunt in her arms.

I didn't deliberately focus on a dish in remembrance in my mother while I was cooking last night, but it came to me, as I was cooking, that I was doing something that my mother would often do in her later years, make a soup for supper that used a commercially prepared beef base and whatever vegetables were in the house. She generally did this because she was, by that time, permanently disabled, and food stamps only go so far. It is one of my great regrets that I could not be financially stable enough to be of any help to my mother, despite my education, until after she passed. But that's a story for another day. This story is about this soup my mother would make.

In earlier years, she would make meatball soup, something that I would eventually take over, and this was her way of making it when she did not have any meat. Last night, we had a plenitude of veggies needing to be used and a man, Miguel-san, who has been very sick for a week. I found myself cutting all the veggies up and tossing them into a pot, with the intention of adding vegetable bases rather than beef base, and rice noodles and peas for the "complete protien" component. A mild, healing soup for dinner for the sick man.

This is what I got:



The contents are carrots, celery, peas, potatoes, onions, cloves of garlic, a packet of onion/mushroom soup, a tablespoon of vegetable base, olive oil, and rice noodles. Michael liked it just the way it was. I peppered it up for its initial serving; later bowls, after the soup had cooled and the rice noodles kind of took over the pot, I needed soy sauce to counteract the flavor of the rice starch. This was my first time cooking any rice-type noodle, and I did not know what happens when you let them stand in liquid. Next time, I'll make some sort of pad thai-inspired dish.

As I ate it, I thought about standing in my mother's kitchen, listening to her describe how she had made the soup, watcher her smile as I told her that I liked it. It is poor folks food, no doubt, and the addition of the olive oil was my little stab at trying to address the one problem of the dish, as I remembered it--the lack of fat made it less flavorful. When I make it again, I'll likely use wheat noodles--and, in truth, the dish will be a little different every time, just as it was for my mother. In a strange way, it was like my mother stood beside me as I stirred, and this living recipe is like another way my mother lives on now that she is gone.

Aunty 'Rouda's ROUS pie.

Okay. So, for the duration of the reign (which means nothing if you are not in the SCA but is an important referent for what I am about to say, so, in the event that there is a non-Scadian reading what I am about to write, at least understand that what's about to follow is not true at all in the real world ;-) ... the Royal whim has been proclaimed, and for the duration of the reign, The Princess Bride is considered documentation for any A&S project. On the Northshield mail list, Gabriella asked for suggestions for altering her feast dishes in ways that might work with this theme. This was my reply:

For instance, you have rabbit, which you are thinking of as the last dish in your first service. And you want this to be your ROUS. Well, then, if you are swapping out the earlier stew for a sandwich--a decidedly post medieval dish--you can balance that by making a ROUS with ROUS. ;-) The soteltie is traditionally the last place in the service order, and so that would work nicely. :-)

ROUS-- a presentation version of the dish, a standing pie that has been decorated and disguised as a Rodent Of Unusual Size. This takes a trip around the feast hall for the Ooohs and Ahhs and then is served to the head table.

A dish of ROUS (Rabbit, Onions, Unguent [the sauce or gravy], Spices) served as simplified standing pies to the remaining tables.

There would be a lot of different dishes you could make with ROUS as the initials--you could be even more clever with a pie made with Rarebit, Oysters, Unagi (Eel!), Squid or shrimp--essentially, a seafood pie in a savory cheese sauce. ;-) An illusion food that completes the illusion by not having any rodent in it. ;-)

Since I have spent much time working on cheese-like sauces, and I love seafood, I think that Aunty 'Rouda's ROUS pie is going to be a dish in development Real Soon. Mixed seafood pies are pretty findable in medieval cookery, so it's a really do-able project. And I'll likely do the other version, too, but it's probably going to have to be red beans or roasted veggies or rice for the r, rather than rabbit. That'll be the totally vegan version.

Geeze Gravies and Grocers, part 1: Grocery stores.

Milwaukee is not a small place. I have occasionally forgotten that, because I grew up in Chicago, which, in all its immensity, easily dwarfs large numbers of the world's cities. I was reminded of the fact that Milwaukee is not all that small when I was hunting for a particular product.

There isn't much cookery going on right now, as mentioned in last post, but that has got to change. I have to eat, and when I saw my food bill this month, I realized that I can't keep this restaurant eating thing up. Sure, I have no time to cook, and yes, it's given me a reason to try a number of restaurants I've been meaning to try, but the plain fact is that I am a social servant in this culture, and so I never have the luxury of spending all the money I might feel like spending.

For a very long time, I have been trying to make a vegan, no-soy-cheese substitute sauce that will stand in for cheese in pre-1601 recipes. The standard vegan substitute in this situation is nutritional yeast, and, while the nootch certainly does impart a flavor that works and is distantly like Parmesan cheese, my blackened Laurel heart will not rest until I can come up with a sauce that will be cheese tasting and comprised of verifiable pre-1601 ingredients. You can make an argument for nootch based on the idea that yeast was certainly used for cookery in period and that it is occasionally written about in a way that you can pretend implies adding it strictly for flavor, but the plain fact, as far as I can tell, is that nootch as a specifically produced food is pretty recent on the "inventions in cookery" timeline.

This is not true of fermented tofu. Somewhere out in the world there are a bazzillion cooks who, when presented with the same challenge, might have said "Oh, yeah, I know just what to do!" and reached for their jar of doufu-ru, but I had to learn it existed. Tofu is not something I ever loved even when I was eating whatever soy jumped on to my plate, so the chances of me stumbling on this stuff became tiny, tiny, tiny the moment I realized I was going to have to cut unfermented soy out of my diet. 99.99% of the tofu on the American market is your garden variety bean curd that, as useful as it is to the general vegan/non-ovolacto piscetarian, is something that anyone with thyroid issues is not going to be able to touch.

Fermented tofu, according to this article, appears in the written record in China in 1578 CE. And so, having stumbled across the existence of the product thanks to surfing teh internetz, I stumbled around the Milwaukee area trying to find it.

And that brings me round to the point.

I suspected I could find the product in one of the many Asian markets in the area. What I wanted to know was if I could find it elsewhere--the Asian markets most likely to have a wide selection of products tend to be more on the north end of the metro area, and thus, a bit out of my way.

In Outpost? Nope. If it's not at Outpost, then there is little point in trying the more standard grocers in the area, although I did give my favorite Sentry a brief run through, just in case. Nope.

However, there is a grocer in the Milwaukee area, a place of legendary status in this metro area, a place that is considered so upscale that a number of my former acquaintances will only shop there because they imagine it adds to their "high-class" cache: Sendiks. I've only shopped there a few times, never particularly impressed either positively or negatively.

I have an impression now, though.

Sendik's sucks.

It sucks like a suck ass sucking thing of suckiness.

I swear to dog, it has got to be by the good will and generosity of the people of Milwaukee that this local chain continues to thrive--kind of like the same way people kept buying Van Heusen shirts because they were "American made" long after it had become very clear that Van Heusen had shipped its manufacturing overseas. Only a willingness to believe the bluff could explain why anyone thinks this is a chain full of unusual and finer foodstuffs for the tony crowd. That may have been true a long time ago, but it is not true now. Is there a place for Sendiks in the Milwaukee market? Sure. If they are offering a selection of things Joellen Average will never otherwise try at a price that isn't too much for her family to bear, great: I'm all for wider experiences for everyone. And if she gets her little ego boosted, well, as long as she doesn't cross my path, it's all good. But is it the establishment it's reputed to be?

Oh, hell, no. I saw nothing there that I could not find elsewhere--with one exception: the despair-inducing deli section.

Well, let's be fair--I'm not going to like anything with mango in it. I'm especially not going to like it if the "crab" turns out to be that shitty fake crab crap with the allergy-provoking egg ingredients in it. So if your special crab salad has eggs and mangoes in it, I'm going to get sick eating it.

Which I did.

If that was all, I'd shut up. But the cabbage salad sucked. The sushi--not something you'd even begin to expect would be fabulous in a grocery story--was just sad, and that was just a vegetable roll. What the hell would it have been like if there was seafood in it? I have long understood that too much wasabi ruins the balance of delicate flavors an amuse-bouche of sushi can provide, but for the first time ever, I was extraordinarily grateful for the wasabi--it changed the awful vegetable roll into a nice crispy crunchy base useful for transporting the fabulous flavor of horseradish into my mouth.

Gak. Sendik's, I am so done with you.

After that trip, I abandoned the immediate vicinity search and went to a north side Asian grocer. Milwaukee's near north side is not the nicer area, but it's not bad. A lot of rural Wisconsinites find it terrifying, and people have left my place of employment after one visit to a home on the north side, too nervous to look past their lack of familiarity with the urban experience and notice that "lack of expensive houses" does not equate with "radically terrifying and vastly dangerous area of horrific poverty."

I found the above jars at Rhino Foods. I popped it open, and, yay! It does taste remarkably like bleu cheese. Yay.


I'll soon be popping some into a non-cheese sauce, hereafter described as a geeze gravy, to determine how it will work as a flavoring agent in a non-dairy béchamel--essentially, what all vegan "cheese" sauces turn out to be. Yes, every vegan food writer talks like he or she has just invented the Best. Vegan. Cheese. Sauce. Evah. whenever they bust out their recipes (hence my thinking of them as "geeze" gravies), but all this tells me is that American cooks really lack in some basic skills. I am eternally grateful to my Junior High School Home Ec teacher for teaching me to make a white sauce. Little did I know at 12 years old that I was being given a key to a cookery kingdom.

Chianti? You think?

There are a limited number of bean varieties available to the average American consumer in the average grocery store. Furthermore, there is plenty of misinformation to be found on teh internetz: one of my favorite falsities is a statement made in some news paper story on the resurgance of the fabulous fava bean that flatly proclaimed that no other bean was ever eaten in Europe prior to the arrival of New World varieties.

Well, there's a food writer whose going to have an "eh, ah, OOPS!" moment one day.

Fava beans are something that I have had some difficulty in finding around here. I keep looking for canned broad beans or fava beans or whatever, but they just have not been about in the stores I frequent--and don't even think about dried fava beans in the local Sentry.

But, as has been said before, I often shop at my well-beloved Outpost Co-op, and one day some number of months ago, I looked up in the bulk food aisle and saw dried fava beans.

At last. I found them.

So I do my research, and then I research a little more, because I've never cooked them before--I can't even be certain I've eaten them, beyond in my own home made seitan. When all my research is done, I have come to understand that the beans need to have their tough brown skins removed before eating.



It took me days to get what would evenually be about 1.5 cups of beans from dried brown pebbles to skinned beauties ready for cooking. I loved the smooth feel and the look, but other food writers were not kidding when they said the skins were tough to remove. Some of the fava beans, even after 3 days of soaking, never softened enough to be peeled.

I sorted through various bean recipies in various pre-1601 sources, and was not wildly enthused by any of them, but since it was clear that I was going to have to cook the beans first, I popped them into the pressure cooker, covered them with water, sprinkled in a little salt, and let them go.

... Just a little too long. ::sigh::

By the time I opened the pressure cooker, the fava beans had cooked to the "perfect for pureeing" stage. I sprinkled in some olive oil, some poudre fort, and mashed them.



They were okay. The dish was not a sufficient return on my effort, but it was not terrible. Fava beans were not the delish treat I had been lead to believe, but I would make this again if it did not require so much effort to prepare the beans. I put the remainder of the dried fava beans (about 3 cups worth, actually) into the freezer, figuring that it would be some long while before I would want to work with them again. The best thing that came from that experiment was the realization that I had come very close to the water:bean ratio needed for the pressure cooker--throw in pre-soaked beans and then cover with 1/2 to 1 inch water.

And a few days go by.

Now, I have not had much time for cookery--or much of anything else--in recent months, and so, when Wednesday last came along and I needed some supper, Angelique and I went off to a restaurant I had tried several years ago but never really got to know, Sharazad.

On a whim, I ordered the app combo, noting that there were quite a few vegan appropriate items thereon, in addition to the spinich pie (quite free of feta cheese). In the app was a dish called foule--a dish I'd never met, a dish of fava beans. I was eager to try it, hoping that it would be inspiring.

It was, all right. The damn brown skins were right on the beans. Frak! All that time and effort, and the skins are perfectly fine to eat.

Other things I noted: I really like their baba ganooj, more than I like the same dish from Abu's Jerusalem of the Gold (which recently changed hands, totally wrecking the bizarre charm of the former interior). The adas majroush (lentil soup) is very nice, and the next time I go, I think I will be adequately fed via the app plate and the soup. There are a number of fish/seafood dishes on the menu, but I'll likely work throiugh all the vegan things, first. I can get a decent fish meal lots of places in town, but a decent vegan meal is a rarer thing.

And I'll be damned if I peel another dried fava. Feh!

Pennsic Eating When You Are Me

Gingered Pottage

I experimented with pressure cooking at Pennsic this year, and I can say with certainty that it is a partial success. The pressure cooker would come close to hitting standard pressure, but it never succeeded; I presume this is related to the fact that the prevailing winds cooled the pot in exactly the right ratio to the flames heating the pot to perfectly balance the heat on the edge of pressure. Foods cooked more nicely, as the lid reduces steam and heat loss even if it did not hit pressure. It would be worth dedicating a pressure cooker to the camping stuff if I can find a better cooker for home use.

We tried several things--a cooked turkey breast for Michael that was very delicious, and various "period in principle" vegetable pottages, where the idea is that you prepare a vegetable pottage comprised of period (or period like) ingredients and enjoy an easy lunch. The above pictured is the most successful, comprised of fresh garlic bulbs, a huge chunk of peeled and diced fresh ginger, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and a rutabaga. Oh, and a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Potatoes are barely period, arriving in the occasional euro cook pot in the 16th century, but I'm not sure about the swede. The earliest reliable reference I can find is a vague description of a seventeenth century record that implies the possibility of unrecorded earlier use.

However, it was very good, and a very reasonable vegetable pottage for a Renaissance persona. If you include the gray area in your time frame, you can eat it without feeling like your place in the space-time continuum is too wretchedly disturbed. And if you can't, sub in one sweet potato and one turnip for a similar flavor and all pre-1601 edible roots.

I generally cooked meat separately for Michael, and he would add it to whatever I made. The primary problem I faced: keeping the meat. If one leaves home with rock solid frozen meat, what one brings has to be cooked within 2 or three days, depending on your cooler. Once cooked, it's only good for 2 or three days. Thus, you can only be sure of having decent meat in the cooler for 4 days, with the expectation that you might get to 6. I am seriously considering for next year precooking meats and keeping a dry-ice cooler, a fresh foods cooler, and a small defrost cooler. As bad as that might sound in terms of gear, it's only the addition of one six-pack sized cooler. I already carry 2 medium coolers to Pennsic and have done so for years.

Most years, I just shop at Giant Eagle for food when I get there, but I did pantry shopping this year--I looked at what I had on hand and just brought food from home. This worked out fine, as well--better, in some ways, as much of what was in the fridge would have had to be thrown out upon my arrival home. This fact also makes me think that the dry ice/wet ice/defrost system is going to be a better idea.

The food court at Pennsic is always something of a challenge. There is very little there for strictly vegan fare, but you can do okay if you allow eggs, dairy, or both into your vegetarianism or your piscetarianism. I did find myself in the position of "eat dairy or starve" a couple of times, so I tried the spinach wrap at Once Again/Nobleman's Inn and the Spinach Pie at Fruity Cobbler. These are the things I ate and can recommend as edible that can fit with a picetarian + dairy food style:

*French Fries from various vendors: I found I liked the ones at Nobleman/Once Again's best.

*Spinach Wrap from the same tent.

*Falafel from Fruity Cobbler. Spinach Pie was okay, but I preferred the Spinach Wrap, above.

*Shrimp and Vegetable stir fries from Delights of Cathy--be aware, however, that they do cook everything in the same woks. Their portion sizes have also gone down.

*Vegetable dishes from Cock & Bull (sauce may be butter or margarine, I didn't ask. Having already had feta cheese by that time, it hardly mattered which was used when faced by my huge-o-matic hunger).

There were other dishes I could have tried, but generally, if I was up in the food court and faced with uncontrollable hunger, I gravitated to the french fries, being the best way to control the hunger and not have to fret about how it was cooked.

Black Beans Two Ways, and more commercial seitan sausage.

So, you know, part of buying a pressure cooker to quickly cook beans means that one will be cooking beans a. lot.

I have a wide variety of beans in my store room, and a quick look at the veggies needing to be eaten suggested the next stop: black beans.



I'd set the beans to soak before leaving for work, and they cooked up quickly in the pressure cooker. I was aiming for one of my favorite black bean recipes, Frijoles Negros. Except the peppers. Never really have green peppers around.

Of course, upon opening the pressure cooker, I found myself with lots of tasty broth and slightly underseasoned beans. Hm. I was too hungry to spend serious time adjusting the dish, so I finished up the plantains and one of the Field Roast chipolte sausages. These are both easily preparted with a little time in the frying pan.

And the beans were fine, the seitan sausages edible, and the platains were yummy. As the other half of this product review, I'd like to mention that the chipolte sausages, while edible, are still not as good as the seitan chorizo by Upton's, and no amount of spaghetti sauce in the world would make those Italian's acceptable. It is extremely unlikely that I will be trying any Field Roast products again. Every one of them has been a disappointment.

However, I still had me some black beans for dinner the next day.



This was actually the more successful meal: the re-spiced black beans with sauteed onions, garlic, jalapenoes, and napalm (a Thai chilli sauce called, properly, sriracha). On the side is quinoa cooked in the black bean broth and beets with olive oil and seseme seeds.

In that meal is the beginning of a comfort meal I think I will love, but since that used up the Frijoles Negros, this is as far as I have gotten.

w00t! Happy McPan!!!!

I close my eyes and I can still see that moment....

I'm in my grandmother's kitchen, and it's decorated like pretty much every other working class home in an area filled with depression bungalows. Creaky old stove, lino on the walls; it's a 1930's time capsule. I'm watching a pan, and the pan has a ... thing... on it. The .... thing .... jiggles every so often, and the pan hisses and spits.

This is fascinating.

"Why is it doing that, Grandma?"

And she looked at me and smiled. "It's a pressure cooker," she answered, as if that explained everything, and no more was said.

I don't know if she ever used it again. I don't remember any of the other Grand Dames in my family using it. Nonetheless, somewhere along the line, I learned a little bit about it, and since switching to a piscetarianism that is just a few fish meals and some honey away from veganism, I've wanted to pursue the interest born that long ago day. I cook a lot of dried beans. It takes an awfully long time. And it heats the house something fierce.

So, standing in the local Kame Apart (the only discount retailer that showed a preference for corporate donations to liberal causes based on the information collated by the apparently defunct buyblue.com), I noticed two pressure cookers on the clearance shelves. One of them came home with me.


I like to make a personal version of Red Beans. It's not in the least based on any "Red Beans and Rice" recipe, simply because it came about through my desire to have a kidney-bean mash and some rice without the overabundance of fake smoke flavor to be found in that atrocity served up at Popeye's Fried Chicken. I decided that this would be the first thing I tried in my new pressure cooker. It takes a long time to cook on the stove top, and even longer in a slow cooker.


There they are, the ingredients in the pan!

In it all went. I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out, because the amount of food in the pan was completely out of proportion to the amount of water the happy helpful instruction manual said I needed. 4 cups. That's right, four frakkin' cups. Anyone with even a little cookery experience should be able to infer that from the amount of ingredients in the picture, four cups was excessive.

Nonetheless, I followed the instructions, this being my first try with a pressure cooker and all, and when the amount of time that was supposed to pass passed, I opened the pan to find......

Kidney Bean Soup.



Goddamn delicious kidney bean soup.

I'm going to have to work on the liquid to solids proportion. However, I'm thinking that even a failed recipe, as long as what goes in is going to result in a pleasant combination, is going to produce a decent broth. The beans were certainly to proper mashing consistency, and the flavor was all there. 30 minutes versus hours and hours and hours, and the cooking did not make the house unbearably hot--an important consideration when the air conditioning in your home consists of one small window unit.

I have the recipe written down in my Box O' Cookery Happiness; the primary deviations from the usual template would be that I used the garlic/ginger paste I love because I had no fresh ginger, and I had about a cup and 1/2 of leftover cooking broth from the yams that I added to the mix. I'll write down exact-ish proportions the next time I make this.

Meranwhile, it's helpful to note this chart of suggested cooking times for dried beans. It's also helpful to note that my pressure cooker is medium pressure, only hits 10 psi rather than 15. It's going to require an additional 4 minutes time for every 10 in the chart--so something that should take 12 minutes will take 16; something that should take 30 will take 42.

Product Review: No sausage love tonight

So, while in my right well beloved Outpost Foods the other day, I noted that they had an owner special on seitan-based sausages. Now, someone stumbling through here might notice that I am fond of seitan as a meat analogue. And I'm an Outpost owner. And so the forces of the Universe conspired to get me to part with my hard-earned money and buy 2 packets of them: Field Roast brand Italian Sausages and Chipotle Sausages. They've been in business for some time now, and so I thought it would be worth trying. Mind you, the first Field Roast thing I'd tried, a grain meat analogue about the size and shape of a tube of liverwurst and made from lentils, was so disappointing that I thought I'd never touch another grain substitute.

But I love my italian sausage, and I'd had some decent "seitan chorizo" from Upton's Naturals, so I thought, what the hell, I'd give it a try.




And so there it is, the Italian sausage, served with saute onions, peas, and mashed sweet potatoes. The peas and potatoes were good. The Italian sausage?

I've got three more of 'em to choke down, because I don't spend that much money on food only to throw it away.

They are not terrible, but they taste exactly like VWG with some oregano thrown in. Maybe that tastes like an Italian sausage to someone who has not eaten the real thing in 5 years or so, but all I could taste was the gluten. I guess my next step is to freeze them (because I don't want to eat nothing but seitan any more than I would want to eat nothing but tofu could I have it) and try them drowned in spaghetti sauce the next time I eat spaghetti.

::sigh::

A Euro Mock .... Part 2 (b)

Roman Inspired Veggie Patties

Continuing with the previous recipe, it's results.

The results are a little sweet for me, and the odd thing is that it didn't get that way until I added the chickpea/fava mix. This was a surprise, because this recipe features carrots and sweet liquids. As no component of the recipe was inedible without final cooking, I tasted as I went along: I thought it would be sweet, if it was going to be so, well before the addition of more legume flour. Next time I make these for myself, that'll be something for me to adjust.

On the other hand, it's tagged "Mikey Likey" because he found them to be just fine the way they came out. The picture above was my lunch on Friday. Today, I served it to Michael on a sandwich with mayo, a little avocado, onion, and cheddar on whole wheat, and to myself on sour dough with onion, avocado, and mustard.

And I can see why he said, "Make that again, honey," because with the sharp, raw yellow onion against the slightly sweet veggie patty, there was a toothsome contrast that we don't get in typical sandwich fare. I can only imagine that the sharpness of the cheddar increased that pleasant gustatory experience for him. Mild cheddar? In my house? Blasphemy!

So I'm going to take the inventions in progress tag off of this, but I'm going to try another route for a veggie burger based on the three receipts that I used here. I really enjoy Apicius Carrots as made way back here, and I'd like to bring that flavor to a veggie patty. Furthermore, I'd like to make a veggie patty that is gluten free, and while this one is good for wheat free and certainly reduces the gluten factor, both oats and barley do have a certain amount of gluten in them.

The other thing I have noticed is that this patty took a lot longer to make than the first version. The carrots took longer to prep & cook, as did the chickpeas and the barley. The black eyed peas/leek were started and finished in a day. The cooking times are greatly shorter for all ingredients in that burger. I begin to understand why some people buy veggie patties. yeah, it's 6 bucks a pack for the ones I can eat, but hell, that's sufficiently less than my hourly salary and I didn't have to run the oven.

The primary advantage of this is that I control the contents. No fake food. Quality local ingredients. Flavors I can't get in the store.

So that's a direction I need fo go as I continue to make my own veggie patties. I'm also eyeballing the Adventist Loaf, and what I can create with that, but that's a story for another day.

A European Mock Meat. Of a Sort. Part 2 (a).

Or, a Sort-of Roman Vegetarian Patty.


Vinegar, Wine, Carrots, Lovage, Mint: some of the components cooked up into patties

This is a more experimental version of Compatible Meat Substitute/Mock Meats based on Joanna Vaught's Veggie Burger Engine.

I like "Veggie Burger Engine" much better that "DIY Veggie Burger Formula," but then, I am steeped in geektitude. :-) Major. Geeque-ti-tude. Call the list of suggested contents and proportions what you will, this is the place that I've been starting.

My goal this time was to address wheat allergies. This recipe is based on several receipts found in Apicius, so it'll be Quite. Roman. in its flavor profile when made to my satisfaction. The primary ingredients I used are listed in Apicius and the burger recipe itself is based on Apicius #31 (A sauce for oysters and shellfish), #124 ({Carrots} another way), #201 (Another gruel -- a receipt that includes chickpeas, barley, and vegetables), and #207 (Beans and chickpeas). The only non-Roman human food item in this recipe would be the oats. According to the texts I consulted (The Natural History of Pompeii and Food in the Ancient World), oats are considered fodder in Rome. The barbarians to the north ate them, but the Romans generally did not.

Roman-inspired Protein Patty/Veggie Burger/Mock Meat:

1.5 Cups cooked barley (1)
1.5 Cups cooked chickpeas
2 cups cooked carrots
3/4 cup oat flour
1/4 cup white wine
1-3 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (2)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 T of honey (period) or 1/2 T of simple sugar syrup (vegan) (3)
sprig of fresh mint
2 sprigs of fresh lovage
3/4 t of ground cumin
1/2 t of ground pepper

When I mixed this together, it was still very wet. Next time I try this, I might try reducing the liquid involved. Since that was not an option, I added:

1/2 cup chickpea/fava flour
1 t cumin seed
1 t lovage seed
1 t ground pepper
and 1/2 t salt

Formed into patties and popped into a 450 oven.


(1) I don't recall precisely where I found this, but there was an instruction in Apicius to soak the barley overnight. I did so, and I got a much softer barley than I usually get in the rice cooker. I am accustomed to a very chewy product out of the cooker, and a soft product only after boiling in a stew for serious swathes of time. This was just right--a barley that was not so chewy that it seemed underdone, and not so soft that it was like mush.

(2) The vinegar I used was a locally made vinegar rather than a commercial product. Vinegar produced by a factory will have a much higher acetic acid content. This is why the amount is flexible. Furthermore, a white wine vinegar and possibly a malt vinegar would also work well here.

(3) There is a great debate among vegans and those who consider themselves vegans but are not according to the strict definition. Honey, an insect byproduct, is not vegan-it's considered an animal product by many a vegan. Others, who take the view that a bee is not an animal, don't have a problem with honey. I know bees to be insects, and so I do use honey. But then, I am not a vegan. Simple sugar syrup isn't something every period cook had in the kitchen (why waste loaf sugar making a sugar solution when there is honey about?) every day, but your other typical choices for a liquid sugar, agave syrup or maple syrup, are new world in origin.

I'll have to share results tomorrow. They're completed they're cooked and been nibbled at, but it's way past my exhaustion level and I'm off to bed. All I can say for sure at this time is that they did hold together and Miguel-san found them "good, like falafel."

Tempeh Win

Tempeh would be one of the forms of soy that I can eat--it's fermente-licious! Whee!

I usually buy it once a month and have continued to struggle with it as a meat analogue. I swear, I go places like Beans and Barley and buy a tempeh sandwhich (usually a tempeh lettuce tomato) and marvel at the magic that happened and turned that slab of fermented soybeans into slices. Taste of the sandwich? Eh, who cares, it's a bland sammy that has a reasonable protein and no cheese. However, I am well aware that if I marinate the tempeh in some tasty sauce, I'll have a much nicer slab o' protein for home use.

Two problems: I can't get it to slice like a slice of meat (how the hell do they DO that? I never get anything but crumbles) and I've yet to try anyone's marinade recipe in a way that doesn't see me choking down something I hate in order to ensure I have nutrition and fuel.

So I ignored what everyone else in the world of vegan blogging does and did what I wanted to do.

I love BBQ sandwiches, and, really, if you have a BBQ sauce that you like, putting enough on will pretty much make anything you want to be BBQ flavored taste like nothing but sauce. So the worry wasn't if I could use the tempeh to make a decent BBQ sandwich, but whether or not the tempeh could succeed without being sauced to the point that I could have just dumped a can of meatless baked beans on some toast and been done.

I'm glad to report that it worked without the use of 2 cups of BBQ sauce to 1 cup of tempeh.


Tempeh BBQ

Chop one cup of onion, 2-5 cloves of garlic. Heat approximately 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan and sautee the onions, garlic, and one tablespoon of hot giardiniera--do not drain the oil out of the giadiniera, it carries spices that will cut the sweet of the BBQ sauce. Crumble the tempeh and saute with the onions, garlic, and giardiniera. When it is sauteed to the point of your preference, add your favorite BBQ sauce. Start with 1/4 cup and add more sauce until the dish is at your favorite stage of sauce saturation. I prefer a slightly dry mix, but lots of people love the sauce dripping out of the sandwich as they bite into the goodness.

Here it is served on toasted whole wheat bread (second slice not pictured, but I assure you, it was a sammy) with an organic avocado, organic strawberries, and organic, steamed green beans with a drizzle of fig flavored balsamic vinegar.

The figgy vinegar was good, but I think I would like to try something a little more bold with it next time.

Without a doubt, I will make this again, perhaps with a smokier BBQ sauce. When choosing, I have to recall that this is going to taste nutty rather than beefy, and choose a BBQ sauce that can work with that.

Note: This is a third coast blog, and no matter where I live, I'm always a Chicago girl. All references to giardiniera should be understood to imply the popular Chicago-style condiment.

Tomato Win

I don't really have time to do a detailed write up of this dish, but I need to at least jot down some notes, that it may be enjoyed again.

This is what happened to the leftover seiten, the leftover brown rice from the veggie burgers, 4 huge organic heirloom tomatoes, 2 large carrots, 4 cloves of organic garlic, pan drippings from the seitan's cooking broth, olive oil, a heaping spoonful of Patak's ginger garlic, and plenty of water.

Michael said, "That was a great lunch you made, honey, I'd eat that anytime."

Which would be why I am here jotting down notes instead of just hoping that the picture will remind me of what I did when I made something--when I started this piscetarian adventure, I'd take a picture of something that I felt turned out well, certain that I'd remember what I did.

I look at those pictures now, more than a year later, and ... yeah ... no clue.

I'm already kind of not certain about the delicious clam-leek-tato stew I made the other day.

So to make sure that a dish Miguel-san specifically hinted he'd want again actually shows up on the table again, here's the fast action steps:

Take the pan out of the refrigerator (you know, I have this weird habit of putting the pan with the dripping right in the fridge--it's a waste to wash out that flavor if you can use it the next day. I know it sounds weird, but if the pan is covered and your fridge is working properly, it's not a problem) and let it start coming to room temperature. Cut up the carrots and garlic, and let them begin to come to room temperature--this reallt does not take long. Now, put the carrots, garlic, and a couple of cups of water into the pot. Cook the carrots to the al dente stage. Now, chop up the tomatoes and add them to the pot with a generous sploosh of olive oil and several sprigs of fresh thyme. Add as much water as is needed to cover the tomatoes and let cook until you can mash the veggies to bits. Mix in approximately 2 t to 1 T ginger/garlic paste. Add approximately 2 cups of cooked brown rice and approximately 2 cups of sliced, onion-soup-braised seitan. Add another generous sploosh, this time a sploosh of red wine. Again, add water as needed and then allow to reduce to the thickness of a thick jambalaya. Because one is using leftovers here, it is always best to make sure it cooks at a boil for at least 10 min after the final ingredient is added.

I have some for my lunch tomorrow. MMmmmMMMMmmmmm. There was enough salt in the drippings and seitan from the onion soup. If you don't have the drippings, substitute onion granules and salt & pepper to taste, or a spoonful of onion soup base. Marmite/Vegimite/Naggi sauce might also work, as would miso if you can have soy.

Seitan bake part two, or, Mock Beef y-Stywyd

I made a first try at seitan with a typical pre1601 European flavoring profile here. This entry is the follow up, describing how it was completed for consumption.

My initial thought was to make a savory pie, mostly because I love savory pies as a handy dandy meal. Mmmmm... Medieval pot pies.... But, of course, most medieval meat pies have fruits rather that vegetables in them--if there is something other than meat in there at all. While I am certain that I will eventually come up with a tasty pot pie substitute, the work I want to do for same is many layered, and I still have work to do on the other components before I start experimenting with the entire concept.

And so I thought about how I might make the seitan work as a tasty meat like substance on its own.

And I remembered Beef Y-Stewed.

I love modern beef stew, but the above mentioned recipe is really about cooking lesser cuts of beef in an excellent broth. We have served a similar dish at feasts in the past, cheap cuts of beef slowly stewed in red wine, spices, and apricot preserves, a delicious dish based on the redaction work of Michelle Santy/Amytis de Fontaine. However, I have never bothered to redact this myself - as much as I enjoy it, I have preferred ways to prepare inexpensive cuts which do not involve cooking with 1/2 bottles of red wine. Call it a quirk, but I prefer wine and beer as flavor enhancers rather than primary ingredient-I'd simply rather drink the wine. :-)

However, I also remembered the delicious beef prepared according to Amytis' method, and so it seemed to me a good way to explore the second cook session for the seitan. The results?


Mock Beef y-Stywyd at the 6 o'clock spot, with apples, walnuts, and peas.

Mmmm Mmmmm Good. This did not taste like Edouard Halidai's Beef y-Stywyd, of course, but it did not taste like unsweetened cinnamon bread, either. Instead, it tasted like a bit of meat that wasn't quite identifiable, very mild, made better with a long stew in a good broth. Not as powerful as real beef, but certainly acceptable and something I plan to do again and again. And, as an accidental bonus, it's a recipe that relies on bread, especially when considering how the recipe is described in late and just post period versions. You can look at this recipe and say, heck, the only thing we left out was the meat. We subbed big chunks o' super dense bread for the beef.

The period recipe for this:

Beef y-Stywyd. Take fayre beef of þe rybbys of þe fore quarterys, an smyte in fayre pecys, an wasche þe beef in-to a fayre potte; þan take þe water þat þe beef was soþin yn, an strayne it þorw a straynowr, an sethe þe same water and beef in a potte, an let hem boyle to-gederys; þan take canel, clowes, maces, graynys of parise, quibibes, and oynons y-mynced, perceli, an sawge, an caste þer-to, an let hem boyle to-gederys; an þan take a lof of brede, an stepe it with brothe an venegre, an þan draw it þorw a straynoure, and let it be stylle; an whan it is nere y-now, caste þe lycour þer-to, but nowt to moche, an þan let boyle onys, an cast safroun þer-to a quantyte; þan take salt an venegre, and cast þer-to, an loke þat it be poynaunt y-now, & serue forth. --from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, and available with transliteration and redaction at Gode Cookery, here.

I did have to spend some time thinking about the base broth that I was going to use. In the end, I decided on a packet of Campbell's dried onion soup. Why?

1. It's the least objectionable of the commercially made, widely available dried onion broths. No soy, no beef. The only food sensitivity that needs to be watched is the dextrose and the yeast extract. You will have corn products in your food, but you're making fake beef. You can look past the trace corn here. There is a comparison of ingredients in commercial onion soup powders here, if you'd like to look for something else. In any event, it's a strong broth that will at least suggest the flavor of beef.

2. The recipe calls for onions--this is a reasonable broth to doctor up, because the source recipe calls for onions at an undetermined amount.

And so, choice made and path firmly before me.... I began.

First, I placed the sliced seitan in the slow cooker and lightly browned it in olive oil, mostly because I was afraid it would fall apart. It did not. I'd not skip that step, though, as there is little fat in the the seitan, and some small additional amount is needed to give this a satisfactory mouth feel. I added the onion soup, enough water to cover the seitan, and let it slow cook.

Given that the seitan had already been seasoned with a number of spices mentioned as part of the cooking broth in the receipt above, I elected not to add them to the broth.

The seitan and broth cooked until such time as I could smell that it was done. You'll know that point. Your kitchen will smell like tasty onion soup. This actually improved the texture of the seitan immensely--before the braising, it was a little too firm, a smidgen too dry, but upon completion, it was just fine. 

The broth was pretty significantly reduced by this time, and so I removed the seitan and added 1/4 c. red wine, 3 T apple cider vinegar, chopped fresh sage (about 8 leaves with the stem, likely 2 T when chopped) and a teaspoon of dried parsley. I put the seitan back in, let it simmer until the broth was reduced to a small amount of thick sauce (which did not take long, there was not much left after the braising) and served it as you see above.

I decided to serve it with peas and walnuts because I'm still a fan of the complete protein school of vegetarian meal planning, and an apple to get a fruit food group on the plate. 

Further exploration of period and slightly post period beef "stew" recipies are here: I may try to include some of these in the next go round.

A European Mock Meat. Of a Sort. Part 1.

No. I didn't suddenly discover that Western Europeans before 1601 regularly substituted fried turnip circles for meat or had managed to figure that bulgur is a marvy sub for finely chopped meat or made barley burgers for Lent (although those are all reasonable choices for dealing with the meat-free option when working with a free flowing minced meat recipe).

No, this is about making a solid chunk o' sumptin that can serve in place of a solid chunk o' meat. This is about veggie burgers from foods and spice choices appropriate to our period.

This is the first of several veggie burgers I'm making based on Joanna Vaught's recipe. These veggie burgers feature ingrediants known to Western Europeans, and so, while they can not be considered something anyone would have made, they can serve as something that is SCA compatible--a sure protein with the flavors of the age.



The primary veggie and protein in these burgers.
Why no picture of the actual burgers? Keep reading.

The recipe:

2 cups chopped, sauteed leeks
1.5 cups cooked black eyed peas
1.5 cups cooked brown rice
3/4 cups vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 almond milk
2 tablespoons red wine
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon grains of paradise
1/2 teaspoon salt

*I chose the spice mix based on a couple of recipes for leeks from Du fait de cuisine (France, 1420), specifically, "White Leeks" and "Sauce Piquant." This is an obvious choice, of course, as the predominant vegetable in this recipe are the leeks.

*The long term prep work doesn't need much attention--a slow cooker for the black eyed peas, a rice cooker for the rice. I like to think of it as handing the ingrediants to a couple of servants and letting them take care of the actual cooking. ;-) Drain the black eyed peas before use.

*In reviewing a mass of leek recipes for the creation of this particular SCA compatible protein, I frequently ran across the instruction to soak the leeks first. I last used leeks with a mock cheese sauce for a recipe I did not blog--the recipe was very good, but the thing was gritty. That was a shock to me, as I had never before run into that problem. Michael suggested that I soak the leeks next time, and since there were so many recipes that include this instruction, I'm going to emphasize this as a non-skippable step in period instruction. Chop the leeks and soak them. This will filter out the grit. I promise. Let them soak for 1/2 hour or so, then drain & sautee them in as much olive oil as is needed.

When you are ready to make the burgers, pre-heat your oven to 400F. If, like me, you use cast iron for cooking, place it into the oven to preheat, as well.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix the veggies, rice, beans in another, then mix the dry ingredieants into that. Now add the liquids and mix it up well to get the gluten activated. If you want, grab a masher and mash the whole mess up a bit. Note that warm beans and rice will get the gluten activating right off, so be prepared to work fast if you are using warm ingrediants.

Form them into patties and place them into the pans and let them bake. Flip them at least once during the baking process. The recipe I am building on suggests 20 minutes a side, but I found I needed much longer, and ended up flipping them every 20 minutes until they were done in accordance with my tastes.

I was initially disappointed in them, because while still warm from the oven, they tasted very strongly of the VWG. Which, as I have said, is not bad, but I didn't throw in all that other good stuff just so I could eat something that tasted like bread. However, after an overnight refrigeration, the VWG flavor disappeared and what I had was yummy, yummy veggie burgers that did not fall appart and which reheated nicely in the microwave. And that would be why there are no pictures--I didn't take a picture when I thought the recipe wasn't going to work in this particular format, and next day, ate them all up before I could get a picture of the leftovers.

The Mystery of Medieval Spice Mixtures

Click on picture to see series of photographs of spices used to make a powder fort.*

Seitan Bake part one includes a generic range of spices: cinnamon, cloves, ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise, and black pepper. These are spices discussed over and over in medieval recipes. I, myself, am not over fond of cinnamon and so tend to make my medieval spice mixtures ginger and pepper heavy. It would be correct to say that I used a powder fort mix in the seitan.

It would also be correct to say that many more (and less) well-researched people have tackled the vagueness that surrounds the contents and proportions of many medieval spice mixtures. I've linked to some of them below, and I would encourage anyone wanting to tackle the issue him or herself be not limited by the ideas of others or the few specific ingredient lists found in the existing manuscripts. Ultimately, you have to eat it. Ultimately, the powder fort of 15th c. France is not the powder fort of 14th c. England, and the powder fort of 14th c. London is not the powder fort of 14th c. York. Similar spices may have been used across all these places and eras, but it is just as valid to add a little something known in period that is not a part of that usual spice range. This is particularly noticeable in the powder douce recipes, which contain a splendid mess of possibilities.

Other people's ideas about the perfect combination of the mystery spice mixes mentioned in medieval cookery manuscripts: powder fine, powder forte, powder blanche, powder douce. Powder may also be spelled as poudre.

An article with a basic spice conversation and multiple recipes for Powders fine, douce, and forte:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080131160345/http://www.thorngrove.net/athenaeum/powder.htm

Other recipes for Powder douce:

http://cookalong.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-poudre-douce.html
http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderdouce
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/douce.html
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-powder-douce
http://www.recipezaar.com/poudre-douce-powder-douce-361645
http://www.livinghistorylectures.com/Powder%20Douce.pdf


Also try: apple pie spice, chai spice blend

Others for Powder Forte:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderforte
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/fort.html
http://www.livinghistorylectures.com/Powder%20Forte.pdf
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-powder-fort

Powder Fine:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/finepowder
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/fine.html

Powder Blanch:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderblanch
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-blanche-powder

You know, I do think it is time for me to pack up my own blends of these spices just to save some time in prep--right now, I tend to measure them out individually, but it would be faster to mix the spices in the proportions I prefer.

*Use of this image is believed to be consistent with fair use as it is used in a reduced-size format, in a no-profit context, to link back to a series of publicly viewable photos which illustrate the subject matter of this educational post. Attribution for photo is found by clicking back to the photo series.

Seitan Bake part one

::rough draft version::

So, I've been thinking about mock meats for the SCA cook. There are plenty of Lenten recipes and so forth in period cookery, but once you cross to veganism or vegetarianism, the substitution of fish for beef is no longer a possibility.

There are no "meat analogues" in western Euro cookery before 1601, as far as I know. One could speculate on the use of certain vegetables or nuts or fungi as part of a meatless medieval diet, but I have not noticed anything that describes such a use. In eastern cuisine, meat analogues come into wide use with the spread of Buddhism. Pre-1601, both tofu and seitan are used in various Oriental cuisines specifically as meat replacements. Thus, both of these substitutes, while not in use in Europe at this time, do exist in cookery in our time period for the purpose of replacing meat. If you wish to use a meat analogue to create a vegetarian version of a beef/chicken/pork/lamb/fish dish, these would be a good choice.

I, myself, enjoy meat analogues, and find that they are very nice forserving as the source of chewiness when experimenting with sauces. However, tofu is something I rarely eat because of the effect of unfermented soy on my body. The primary fermented soy-based analogue, tempeh, does not appear in any written records before the 19th century.

Seitan, however, is a wheat based meat analogue believed to have originated in ancient China, AND it is easily made by the home cook.

So, for my first medievaloid mock meat, I decided to alter Joanna Vaught's standard seitan recipe with the typical spice profile as usually found in medieval sauces. Out with the veggie broth, nutritional yeast, and so forth, and in with a red wine sangria, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, & long pepper.

One reason I particularly like Joanna's base recipe is because she adulterates the traditional 100% vital wheat gluten (VWG) recipe with Bob's Red Mills chickpea/fava bean flour. Any Scadian cook worth her salt knows that these two legumes are proven period, and most nutritionists still recommend the practice of complementary protiens. The VWG plus the legume flour works to create such an improved product while still staying in that pre-1601 range we love so well.

But after that, it's all in your spices. I used sangria and olive oil for the wet ingrediants, VWG, chickpea flour, and the above mentioned spices for the dry mixture, blended it all together, rolled it into sausage shapes, and steamed it in the rice cooker for an hour.

And what flavor sensation did I get out of the pot?

Something that tasted remarkably like unsweetened cinnamon bread.

:sigh:

Well, I certainly did not expect it to taste like beef or pork, but I was hoping the wine would give it a little more of a stewed flavor. And, too, I know that basic seitan like thise is a first step.

So, now, I have to decide what sort of second flavoring treatment I am going to give it. I've got a texture and a flavor profile that should work with many a medieval meat recipe... Now to see how it subs in.

Blancmange as a savory dish

A Modified Medieval Dinner of Delish +3

Blancmange is a ubiquitous medieval dish, and a careful reading of the many, many, many recipes reveals a lot of different ways to interpret the recipe. My first attempt to do so was straight out of Pleyn Delit and I didn't like it very much.

I needed a quick dinner tonight, though, and something that would appeal to omnivores. Digging through the fridge, I found I had some vegan mushroom soup I had made some while ago, and it occurred to me that this would be a very good way to try blancmange again.

I'd like to say I felt all kinds of clever, but it's not like rice cooked in mushroom soup is any sort of unexpected dish here in the land of hotdish. What I did feel pretty good about was the realization that it would serve as a veganized blancmange, as the soup had been made of equal parts mushroom broth & sweetened almond milk, plus flour, salt, little garlic. So, into the pot it went, one measure of the soup, one measure of water, a teaspoon of Better Than Bullion's no-chicken base, and one measure of rice.

I couldn't believe how good it was when compared to the Hieatt redaction . And it does not taste like your usual Lutheran Church Basement cuisine. Thank heaven. Instead, a hint of savory, a hint of sweet, and what I imagine the flavor profile of blancmange might have been before it evolved into the milk jello of modern cuisine.

That, in and of itself, would be a fine medieval blancmange. Mushrooms instead of chicken and otherwise almonds, sugar, rice. The blancmange is served with asparagus, onions, and a mock chicken breast that had been defrosted and "seared" in olive oil.

Cooking Vegetarian for Medieval Feasts

I have not been the cook for a feast in a long while, but one thing that always irked me was the meat-heavy planning that went into most feasts at that time. One of my proudest moments was the day a vegetarian couple came to me and said, "Oh, thank you so much, this was the first feast at which I have ever had enough to eat and had a variety of things to choose. And it was all good."

(That would be Stone Lion II, many years ago, and the last feast I planned. I've offered a few times since, but there are always others who are hungry for the position, and I let them have it.)

When I started expanding my website to include interests beyond illuminated manuscripts, I put up a small page of recipes that I had prepared as primary vegan proteins at feasts. Very simple legume dishes. It's rarely been accessed, according to the site statistics, but it nonetheless deserves saving, and it is here. I had a good time writing the recipes as if I was writing in period, and I think I may continue that tradition with original recipes meant for period cookery--another good reason to developed this blog's voice here. In any event, I cook these recipes all the time, and will move them here for safekeeping. Where they still won't be accessed much. ;-)

I recently found a link to another page that considers vegans and vegetarians in feast planning, Katherine Rowberd's Medieval food for vegetarians. I like this article, in that she has the same attitude I have: if you pay attention and plan, you can stuff everyone and no one will notice. She has a reasonable essay on planning and a selection of recipes to choose from for cooks who are not interested in researching. I'd eat feasts more often if more Head Cooks followed this advice.

Danial Meyers has listed out a whole swathe of piscetarian & vegetarian recipes on his site, here. Note that this is a site that considers fish as a vegetarian alternative (a la the use of pesco-vegetarian as a vegetarian dietary style). :-)


Gode Cookery has one wild mashed up table of contents for all recipes, here. Sift through them for recipes that support the more restrictive dietary styles. Some are completely medieval, others are not.

McCheaper Veggie Burgers

Garbanzo Burgers and Beets

Well, I love veggie burgers. There are limited brands available to me, as the majority of commercially prepared burgers have a soy base. There are rice burgers and there are sunflower seed burgers and other kinds I can eat, but the price of the pre-made veggie burgers is silly in comparison to the cost of the components--and they are, ultimately, processed products.

So I spent some time looking through variations available on Allrecipies.com and finally decided to try the Garbanzo Bean Burgers. I followed the recipe pretty exactly, with the addition of cumin, flax seed, and onion. The resultant product was tasty enough, nothing to write home about, but the effect--veggie crumbles---versus the amount of work it was to make these things means I won't be making them this way again.

Vital Wheat Gluten. That's what I figured would be needed--that, and a higher proportion of garbanzos to veggies, mostly because the amount of veggies versus legumes in this recipe was so perfect that there wasn't really a taste of anything. I love garbanzos and so want that flavor to dominate. I began thinking about how the recipe might be modified to make up for that, only to stop by Outpost in my neighborhood and find that they were out of the VWG. Feh.

Fortunately, the wait was a blessing in disguise: I got home and found that Joanna Vaught had posted a generic recipe for burgers featuring VWG as the agent that assists the burger in binding. I can't wait to try. If my first try turns out even a teensy bit promising, I can see multiple versions appearing in these posts.

And beets? mmmmmm. beeeeets. I less than three beets big big big time.

Experimental soup

Beets, Rutabega, and Cauliflower Tangerine Soup

So, I'm trying this veggie burger recipe. And it leaves a lot of leftover veggie scraps that are too little to do much of anything in a single dish, but it just kills me to throw away usable food.

So I throw it all into the pot to make a veggie stock, always a useful thing in a house like this one, and suddenly spied the huge number of tangerine peels I'd generated earlier in the day. MM, snackariffic tangerines. In they went.

Throw in a cut up head of cauliflower, cook to soft, and there you go, a soup of citrusy cauliflower goodness. I think I put in too many peels, and next time would start small--the peel of one tangerine rather than three.

Beets is beets, cherry tomatoes is cherry tomatoes, and the rutabega was served up with a litle olive oil and sprinkled with seseme seeds.

ETA, 8 May

I thought this might make a fabulous cold soup, but the pith in the peels made the soup bitter while it was refrigerated. I ate it all, but it wasn't as nice as I hoped it would be. Hopefully, fewer peels will help with that, too.

Meals when you're on wheels: Fred's Drive In, Milwaukee

One of the most shocking realizations that I had when I became firmly committed to a piscetarian dietary style was this: Road Food Is Hard To Find.

We were standing in front of a Subway, my beloved and I, and I was In Need of Protein. The one thing I can get in nearly any town, iceberg lettuce and some bread that probably was not made with eggs and possibly was not made with milk, was not going to cut it. He, however, had thought that Subway would be fine--tuna sandwiches, you know? But I stood there and starved, so hungry that I actually cried, because the tuna salad is mayo-based. Eggs. Even if the mayo was vegan (and why Subway would use veganaise on a tuna sandwich, I dunno), I couldn't eat it--the soy would move it out of my dietary range.

He learned that day that when I said no animal products but sea creatures, I meant it. It was a long ride to the family home that morning. Ever since that day, I have learned to pay attention to Road Restaurants that we can all eat at.

Fred's Drive-in is one of those places I will go to when I am jonesing for the bad foods of my home town. Fred's is one of several Milwaukee area restaurants that is devoted to a style of artery-clogging eating that is immensely pleasurable and insufficiently available away from the southwest corner of the Third Coast. Fred's specializes in Chicago dogs and Italian Beef and Polish and Italian sausages like you'd find at a vendor outside Wrigley Field. MMM, giardinara!! MMM fried onions!!! MMMM lots of other stuff I don't eat anymore!

Fred's, however, has something that the other good Chicago-style beef joints in the Milwaukee area don't have: the Flynn Fin.

The origin of the sandwich, in short: The police chief saw the restaurant across the street from his brand-spankin' new police station and gasped at the beauty of the menu... and then realized that it would not have the best health effect on his officers. Really, you want the police officers to be healthy. Flynn certainly does. And so he asked the owner for a sandwich a little less overwhelming and just as tasty. The Flynn Fin was born shortly thereafter.*

It's a salmon fillet on your choice of roll, bun, or rye, with options for additional condiments and lettuce or tomato. I got mine on rye, with the lettuce and tomato, and brown mustard. Since I was having a bad-eats day, I had fries as well.

I have to say, I was happy. Here in the land of the Friday Fish Fry, you would think that most chefs can do simple fish like salmon. I assure you, there are many who can not. Fred's Drive-in can. The salmon was cooked appropriately, the lettuce was real leaf lettuce, the tomato was ripe rather than pink cardboard, and the amount of mustard was just right--mustard can overwhelm a sandwich. This didn't.

The fries were the fat, crinkle cut sort. Not my favorite--again, because they are so often cooked poorly--but these were fine. And Hot. And excellent conveyors of rich and tasty ketchup. MMMM.

There is also a breaded fish fillet on the menu, more like the sort of fish sandwich you'd get at a fast food chain. I presume it's good, as I've never had anything I don't like there-hell, even the Decider likes Fred's--but I won't be trying it anytime soon, as the Flynn Fin tasted so very fine.






*A longer version of the story is here.

Shiney new practice piscetarian cookery blog!!!

Okay, I confess, I'm not going to leave this blog in this location forever and ever, Amen. I have a New Shiny Site under construction, but I am just too excited by this idea to wait until the New Shiny Site is live, and doing this here will let me concentrate on behind the scenes things there. This is a beginner blog, a baby steps blog, a place to move all my cookery. I haven't even figured out what I want everything to be called--I've gone through 15 different names. But obviously I like Pretty Kettle a lot, as that's what is up top.

But I can start with firming up a mission and pulling the various recipes into one organized pile.

I eat a very specific style of diet, one which has various names and has been around for centuries. I am a Piscetarian. I eat plants and no meat but fish, 99% of the time. I can't say I am always a strict piscetarian, but I do my best, and the largest bulk of my meals are actually vegan friendly. I focus on locally available foods before long-distance, and organic over factory farmed.

This blog is intended to fill a space. You'd think that with all the fabulous vegan blogs out there, I would be well served and would not need to add another voice for cooking an alternate dietary style from scratch to the internet. However, when I built this page, it became very apparent that there was a place for one more specialty cook.

My emphasis is on modern and medieval cookery. There will be things here to feed piscetarian, true. That's my main focus. So also will there be things to feed vegans. I hope to be particularly helpful to vegans who can't eat soy--I can't either, not in any real way. This would be why so many vegan blogs are of minimal help to me--there is a huge emphasis on soy replacement foods. However, a well-developed piscetarian diet is going to focus on plant foods for most meals. It makes sense to be able to cook as a vegan cooks. Too, I'd like to be of service to those people who are transitioning. If you are going to go all the way, the piscetarian/pescetarian/pesco-vegetarian dietary style is a nice way to ease into it.

However, I'll also be focusing on the cookery of the old world, before the new world foods became prevalent. I love history, and I love redacting recipes. I also enjoy the challenge of cooking something that would be recognizable to people who lived in the era, and modifying that cookery so that it can be eaten by people with alternative dietary styles.

Well, that's a rough draft, but all mission statements start with just such a beginning. And now, there is cooking to be done and a product to be reviewed. So I'll go eat it and tell you what I think. :-)